managing user accounts without NIS

[Tom Haynes]

> I have looked at the archives searching for a good way to manage user
> accounts on a beowulf cluster.  Some people suggested using rsync, but
> my question is, how?  rsync is nothing more than an efficient version
> of rcp; it doesn't really "synchronize" files--by that I mean that as
> soon as (or soon after) one file gets modified, the other files get
> updated.  In particular, I want my users to be able to change their
> passwords or their login shells from any node and have the relevant
> files in /etc updated on all nodes, without the users having to do
> anything else on their part (like running some "update" script).  I
> 
> Victor
> 

Use rsync in a cron job that runs every minute.  If all you are
talking about is your password file, it will be pretty small.
The majority of the overhead will be in kicking off the rsync
process every minute.

-- 
Tom Haynes
thomas at netapp.com